


And Now

by samskeyti



Category: Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Chabon
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-16
Updated: 2009-06-16
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:33:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samskeyti/pseuds/samskeyti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"A year ago, when I wanted to be around someone like you, I had to, you know, make you up." (Michael Chabon)</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Now

  


It’s like this, scarcely planned and years in the making, frantic packing and a headlong run, not lifting his head until he tumbled, rumpled and sleepless into the third class seat of a cross country train. Up all night, his eyes plagued with an involuntary blinking like a busted neon sign.

A ten minute stop in the middle of who knew where, the platform a slow dance of depleted families and drop-shouldered salesmen. Down by the ladies lounge there are phone booths, the kind with the half-panelled doors and the black bakelite phone clamped limpet-like to the wall. The kind his father maybe lingered outside and never entered. Sammy can feel himself inside there, his voice crackling over the line, the call ahead of himself he doesn’t get to make. He’s got the words lodged low in his belly, useless as a handful of stones.

He’s not ridden this track before tonight, at least not in body, and tonight he’s years late, so many years after his star shot west, his seventy year comet, his broad-chested, bright-haired boyfriend. That was what he may have been: boyfriend. What he was.

He swabs a crescent of condensation from the windows and, before he means to, speaks at the glass, at the vacant booth beyond it - _changed my mind._ He mumbles and though the carriage is close to empty, he has the start of the red-faced, inward-folding sensation he’s woken up to a couple times – not more than three or four – finding his face in the pillow, nose buried as if in collar and scarf, the last trace of sweat and hair cream evaporating as he wakes.

Rattling across the plains, the moon hovers outside his window, tailing him and watching with a sombre gaze until he curls his back against the window and draws his knees up to his face, the bones of his legs pressing red flares over his eyelids. Like Tracy’s face, years ago, hovering above him lit red and jack-o-lantern gold by their lighters. When he grinned he was light from cheek to cheek, a cartoon sun. Sammy basked.

It’s still there. His wound, the secret, mutated limb he’d had sprouting from his chest then ripped away, layers of him gone. He shudders. It’s like a wind blasts through the fluttering, unsealable rent in his self.

In that instant he trashes his novel, imagines himself outside the window, slipping pages to a trackside fire rollicking in an oil drum, hearing them folded slickly and swallowed, the flames chomping like a jowly mutant dog. Or on a ledge back east, posting sheet after sheet into skyscraper air. Now. Now he’ll write himself out to the sand and nodding palms and boundless sunshine of the west coast. Down the wide streets with low buildings letting the sun slant across them, illuminating the broad, linen-clad back of the man on the sidewalk. His back’s muscled, firm and solid, but it moves unevenly, cants to the left from the hip that was never quite the same after being dashed against branches as his parachute wobbled groundwards, great gulps of air spilling from its caught up edge. Or being wrenched free of a harness and dragged through the shattered jaw of the cockpit. Or seared in the fire that caught him, held him for a speechless half-minute before he tumbled free and rolled across the jungle floor.

Sammy’s suitcase slows him grievously and the figure turns the corner before he can gain on him enough to chance speaking. He’ll throw his voice a little but not shout, say, “Hey! Bake,” flat and casual, just to see if he turns. Sweating and pink-faced and prickling cold, and the corner past the station’s crowded with every type and shape of person but for the one he needs. The one he always needed, truth – years too fucking late – be told.

He’ll be there, Sammy can see him, leant gasping against the wall of a motel shower as Sammy drops to his knees. Sprawled boneless on the bed of an apartment lit with slants of glowing dust, his cock heavy and unforgettable on Sammy’s tongue, his hands tense, loose then tense in his hair. Tip-toeing to the windows late at night, naked and half hard already, Sammy watching with a ripple of nervousness that stills when Tracy twitches the curtains, his face set in mock outrage, before stalking back to pin Sammy to the bed.

Sammy follows him through all of these West Coast haunts, writing page after page, and then. Then. He’ll hold him, run his hands up his arms, to his shoulders, kiss along his jaw and pull on his lip with his teeth then draw back, smiling steadily in the dark as he says, “I am, Trace.” Tracy merely regards him, his lips wet and curved up at one side, he doesn’t say a word. “Shoulda told you.”

The slow blink of Tracy’s eyes, the jut of his chin and finally, finally the smirk, knowing, fond, all of it – it catches Sammy in the side like a kick or a truncheon and he leans in, urgent, hoarse as he says against Tracy’s mouth, “I am.”


End file.
